ByJoyce Mandell | Jane Jacobs in the Woo | August 6, 2017

Walking the streets of Oakland and San Francisco gave Joyce Mandell and like-minded friends plenty to think about as it relates to Worcester's changing landscape.

I stretched out on the red eye flight from Oakland, California, to Boston and tried to sleep. My thoughts were swirling as I tried to make sense of a four-day, whirlwind trip to Oakland this July for the 2017 YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) conference, a gathering of pro-growth, pro-housing activists. Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance, a statewide policy group, had invited a 20-person delegation of new urbanist activists from across Massachusetts to attend the conference, in order to learn best practices to increase the housing stock in economically booming, housing-poor cities most evident in the Boston metropolitan area.

San Francisco and the East Bay serves as a classic case study of the hyper-gentrification of cities that Richard Florida is naming the “new urban crisis” — an economic boom leading to a demand in housing that can’t be met, the trend of real estate as investment for profit not for living, the increase of neighborhoods of strangers as more units get flipped over to Airbnb or sit vacant as capital investments for global elite, the surge of luxury high towers that hijack some of the best views, and the subsequent rise of tent cities as more and more people are evicted from their homes.

The San Francisco Bay Area is a sorry sight now as inequality increases, the poor are forced out on the streets and the middle class is barely hanging on.

“Oh, Worcester will never have this kind of urban crisis,” many will argue. “We just don’t have the economic or cultural draw of a San Francisco, New York or Boston,” they’ll say.

Listen to the sounds of the backhoes and the echoes of wrecking balls downtown. Smell the debris in the air. Close to 1,000 units of luxury housing adjacent to the downtown Common are primed to saturate the real estate market in the next year or so. The new CitySquare development slated to open its first units by the end of 2017 will offer its affluent tenants concierge services, yoga and spinning studios, a fire pit and a swimming pool.

This article is shouting out a call-to-action: As we welcome fully the Worcester renaissance we’ve always hoped for, we need to put into place policies that ensure this emerging, trendy Worcester still maintains its greatest strengths – our affordability, diversity and funky down-home grittiness.

Let me begin with two stories from my journey to the Bay Area:

Courtesy of Jane Jacobs in the Woo/Joyce Mandell

Downtown Oakland in a state of flux. Public art on old buildings is a sign or a symptom of current gentrification taking place.

A Tale of Two Bagels. In search of bagels for breakfast, I found two places within a block or so of the conference on Broadway in downtown Oakland. Jimmy’s Deli, a humble abode with old, scuffed-up floors, dusty countertops and a simple pop-up letter menu on the back wall, reminded me of the down-home diners in Worcester. The deli was empty of patrons except for a father, who appeared to be wearing a bus driver’s uniform, talking in Spanish to his tween daughter. A sign on the front counter requested “no use of cellphones” in the store. The deli owner, in a thick accent, took my order for a plain bagel, toasted, with cream cheese. My yummy bagel cost me $2.30.

The next morning, I went to the other eatery, the Awaken Café, just a block away from Jimmy’s. This new establishment sported dark hardwood floors, flashy colored art placed strategically on the walls, and clean round tables. The establishment was full of latte-sipping white patrons, typing furiously on laptops or talking on cellphones. The young, blonde barista took my toasted bagel and cream cheese order and later served me at the table. The bagel was exactly the same as the day before at Jimmy’s, except the short-order cook had loaded the bagel mile high with cream cheese and added a little plastic cup with six sad-looking grapes. The cost of my bagel and cream cheese was $4.59, twice what I paid at Jimmy’s the day before. “Those are some expensive, pathetic grapes!” I thought to myself.

I realized that this simple bagel was a tangible symbol of the struggle of ownership of downtown Oakland. As in any neighborhood in the process of gentrifying or upscaling, one sees the embers of the businesses that once thrived. Now, those businesses are being forced out by the businesses that cater to the new high-income residents.

Oakland’s once desolate downtown got a shot in the arm during Jerry Brown’s tenure as Oakland mayor from 1999 to 2007. His “10K plan” to get 10,000 residents to live in downtown and in Jack London Square spearheaded a flurry of development of primarily market-rate housing. This trend continues under the leadership of the current mayor, Libby Schaaf. However, the new mayor has also pledged to protect tenants squeezed out of the hot housing market through such actions as developer fees to be used for affordable housing funds. The pressure is on, though. This past year, landlords, out for profit, defeated legislation to protect the single room occupancy (SRO) hotels that have historically housed some of the most economically vulnerable residents. In 2004, there were 2,285 SRO units. This number has dwindled to only 1,311 in 2017, as this traditionally affordable housing has been converted to market-rate units, student dorms or even fancy boutique hotels.

One doesn’t have to be a sociologist to note the apparent battle for control of the streets of downtown Oakland.

I’m walking to Desco’s, the upscale restaurant where Friday night dinner is planned for the Massachusetts YIMBY delegation. We eat prosciutto and melon, order $35 entrees, drink orange wine, laugh and joke and plan the new urbanist revolution in our own backyards. Right outside on the streets, though, I pass by people splayed on the sidewalk, asking for spare change or talking out loud to themselves in the thick air. I wait for the walk sign next to a man, down on his luck, whose unwashed smells waft over to me. He pumps his fists at the rushing cars and yells, “This is my street too! I deserve to be here!”

Every single person I see in distress in downtown Oakland for the three days I am there is brown- or black-skinned, a testimony to how institutionalized racism and classism intersects, preventing poor people of color from benefitting from the economic boom happening in this city. As I ponder the changing downtown with its new upscale restaurants, concierge housing, renovated theater spaces, I ask, will Jimmy’s Deli and the Awaken Café be able to thrive side by side? Or will Oaklanders, in a developing, hot economy and real estate market, see the Awaken Cafés colonizing the Jimmy’s Delis of the area?

Maybe on my next visit, I won’t find a place that will sell me a simple bagel and cream cheese for $2.30.

Would you like a Kleenex? I am taking the BART train from Oakland to San Francisco to meet my friend who will be leading an Alfred Hitchcock tour starting on the exclusive Nob Hill. A heavy-set, brown-skinned man in clean, casual clothes enters the train carrying a plastic bag filled with new mini Kleenex packs. He hands a pack to every passenger on the train along with a typed card that tells us his story. He has a five-year-old daughter and he has no home for her. Please think about buying this Kleenex to help her, he says. I fish around for a dollar or two and hand it to the man and give him back the Kleenex so he can use the prop on his next ride. I turn to my seatmate and ask her, “Does this happen frequently here?”

“People are getting evicted all the time around here,” she begins. “Have you seen all the tent villages? So many people living out on the streets. And don’t just think it’s because people are on drugs or have mental illness,” she continued. “The other day, I saw two children, almost babies, outside a tent, and a grandma was cooking over a makeshift stove. Families are out there. There’s not enough housing and what is there, many people can’t afford.”

She proceeds to tell me her own housing story. An artist from the Midwest, she came to the Bay Area to make and sell her art. Wealthy people can afford to purchase good artwork. However, living in San Francisco required her to work two full-time service jobs just to pay for her housing and other basic living expenses. Consequently, she had no time for her art. Something had to change, so she found an underutilized factory building in Oakland, and, with four other artists, appropriated part of it to cobble together a live/work/art space. They built walls and installed plumbing and made it somewhat habitable. The good news is that she now has lowered her housing costs so she can make art. I reminded her of the bad news: that a fire in December 2016 had taken 36 lives in a similar warehouse-turned-artist-collective. She shrugged her shoulders. What else can she do?

Tell me your housing story

Everyone in the Bay Area seems to have a housing story they want to tell.

My friends hail from Oakland, San Leandro and Alameda, and they all say the very same line: “It’s good we bought when we did, or we would never be able to afford to live here now.” Even though one friend has a stable fixed-rate mortgage, he still toys with the idea of moving back East. “When it costs $9 round trip on BART, or when we go to a mediocre restaurant and the bill comes out to over $100 for the two of us, who can afford this?”

One Uber driver in Oakland told me he commutes more than an hour just to drive his car for others. The driver finds it too expensive to live in Oakland, but plenty of well-to-do people in the city make for good business. Another Uber driver can’t stand the “everyone out for himself” climate in the Bay Area, and is about to uproot and move to Reno, Nevada. Another man bragged that he was doing his part in increasing the supply of needed housing by building an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), or granny flat, adjacent to his single-family home in a densely packed Oakland neighborhood.

California state Sen. Scott Wiener, the policy wonk ally of the YIMBY movement who has filed statewide legislation to expedite the permitting process for new housing development, links his own journey to the desperate need to create new housing in housing-starved districts. After graduating from Harvard Law School more than 20 years ago, Wiener moved to the gritty Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, to a rent-controlled apartment. Eventually, he was able to purchase a small condominium unit in the Castro neighborhood. He understands that the easy avenues he experienced when he first moved to the city, finding adequate, affordable housing, are no longer available to newcomers; this prompted him to become a housing YIMBY advocate. Housing should not be a privilege for the few, but a right for the many.

The new urban crisis Wiener is addressing in his work to increase urban housing stock and infill development is palpable, especially in the innovative, tech-focused, globally connected urban hubs and metropolitan regions of San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C. and other major American cities. People are flocking to these cities and their satellite communities in search of plentiful well-paying positions in the technology and finance sectors, opportunities for artists, and jobs in the lower-paying service sector. Cities, benefitting from the innovation that occurs when people live and interact close to each other, are economically booming. Yet, housing supply often has not simultaneously risen to meet the demand of so many newcomers.

The urban population explosion in the United States is also due to a larger cultural trend: that of affluent suburbanites moving back to the cities.

In the 1960s, cities were the places that wealthy, predominantly white people were trying to escape, and where mostly poor people of color remained. At the time, federally subsidized highways not only sliced through and destroyed many poor urban neighborhoods, but the highways also became vehicles to transport the affluent to developing, sprawling, auto-dependent suburbs.

Yet the baby boomer dream of owning a car and a single-family home with a water-thirsty lawn in a quiet suburb has given way to a new millennial dream of ditching the car and living in a neighborhood where one can easily find anything one needs. Walkable, densely packed, mixed-use neighborhoods with plenty of cultural amenities, the kinds of neighborhoods found more readily in urban areas, are now in high demand and shorter supply.

Here is how this housing crisis manifests in the Bay Area: Micro-units, which are SRO-type apartments for six-figure earning tech workers, rent for $1,600 a month. New luxury building towers have darkened and empty units because they are purchased simply as investment properties by global super-rich elites. There is a surging tide of tent cities as evictions mount and affordable housing is converted to market-rate units.

According to a July 21 New York Times article, foreign investors spent more than $153 billion nationwide on real estate investments, pushing up housing prices, especially in the Bay Area, so that first-time homebuyers’ dream of a house becomes out of reach. People on the bottom rungs fall off. Homelessness has surged in the past two years, and the census numbers are staggering: There are 2,761 homeless people in Oakland and 5,629 people in the larger Alameda County. “Is it fair that a wealthy person can purchase a second, third or even fourth home that is left vacant for most of the year, when so many don’t even have a primary home?” a friend asks. He points to the new luxury towers, which often hijack the best views, as a symbol of this affluent takeover of the city, just as the affluent benefitted from the highways that moved them out to suburbs a generation before. Poor people once pushed out of neighborhoods by rich people’s highways are now shunted aside by rich people’s luxury urban towers.

For the first time ever, I felt depressed by a visit to the Bay Area.

I saw from the window of the BART train the miles of tents precariously propped up under bridges and in vacant lots, the temporary fragile shelter of people who have nowhere else to go. I recall being viscerally overwhelmed when I traveled through India 20 years ago. Riding on the trains into New Delhi, I would see the miles of makeshift shacks, the women cooking over hot stoves, the men defecating off the empty train rails that served as the very public toilet. Wait! Am I in India? I became confused and disoriented. No, this is not India, but the United States. How can this injustice be sustainable? How would it be different here if we all were committed to building fair, healthy and loving places? Maybe I do need the Kleenex that the homeless man tried to give me on the BART train ride.

Most of the activists at the YIMBY conference were dedicated to addressing this housing crisis head-on, framing the problem in the basic economic concept of supply and demand. If there is not enough housing for all, then housing supply must be increased in any way possible: through expedited permitting, zoning changes that support infill development, additional granny flats and vertical housing expansion. They mock naysayers (NIMBYs) who come up with excuses to put a halt on housing development — the people who speak out against new development projects at public hearings, holding up zucchinis that may not grow because of shadows from higher buildings, the people who complain about traffic or neighborhood preservation or the environment.

How can groups such as the Sierra Club call themselves “pro-environment” and take a NIMBY stand against higher urban density that can help prevent the waste of resources from greenfield developments and help prevent the spread of exurban sprawl?

“Burn a developer,” a group of protesters screams in anger on the sidewalks below the YIMBY conference. Even though YIMBY conference-goers were likely to discuss methods of maintaining and increasing affordable housing stock for the majority, YIMBYs are also perceived by some as evil free-market capitalists because YIMBYs support private developers who have taken the lead in building market-rate and luxury housing. The anger is palpable in Oakland, where four new for-profit housing developments, often perceived as the cause of displacement of poor people, have been victims of arson during the construction phase.

Are new luxury housing projects a vehicle to increase needed housing stock and relieve pressure for all home dwellers (the YIMBY stance), or do these luxury units bring more hipster, affluent gentrifiers to neighborhoods on the margin, and thus end up displacing middle-income and poor people (the NIMBY stance)? This question is one that we have to ask and answer right here in Worcester.

San Francisco, Oakland and the Bay Area: A warning and wake-up call for Worcester

It was a relief to get back to Worcester, where the mortgage on my four-bedroom house on the West Side is comparable in price to a rent-controlled studio apartment in a marginal neighborhood in Oakland. My housing story may resonate with so many other Worcesterites. We chose to root in this city because of its affordability, especially compared to the rising cost of living in the metropolitan Boston area.

Yet there is a definite change in the air here. Although it seemed laughable over 25 years ago to call Worcester the “Paris of the ’80s,” there is something real and almost tangible about the potential renaissance that Worcester is now facing. New restaurants, many sourcing locally grown food, are opening up all the time. Millennial college students are starting to stay after graduation and offer their passionate leadership to build the innovation economy and the cultural life of the city. We’ve seen the rise of maker spaces such as Technocopia; the plethora of public art murals commissioned by POW! WOW! Worcester; the playgrounds built and buildings rehabbed through Working for Worcester, a citywide community service initiative founded by two Holy Cross students; and the youthful ideas funneled through the visionary tactical urbanist demonstration projects of Action! Worcester. These grassroots efforts have paved the way for private developers to finally note the potential that has been here all along: This city can retain and attract what Richard Florida refers to as the creative class.

The developers’ guess is that Worcester is now primed to retain a larger percentage of students graduating from local colleges and universities, and to attract people priced out of the hot Boston housing market, especially because Worcester has commuter rail access to downtown Boston. Most of the large-scale, for-profit housing projects being built are located in transit-oriented spaces in downtown or the Canal District, within walking distance of Union Station.

Here is where I diverge from some of my social justice friends. I don’t think there is anything inherently bad in a bit of upscaling.

Flickr / Leonardo DaSilva

The shape of downtown changes by the day — but is the social risk worth the financial reward?

I attend yoga classes, hang out in BirchTree Bread Company (nursing my tea and writing for hours), appreciate the new murals on the windowless facades of downtown buildings, listen to the free Elm Park concerts in the summer, and pick up kale and strange greens at the farmers market. For the past year, Jane Jacobs in the Woo has been proposing the ingredients for a recipe of a thriving Worcester: creatively reusing historic properties; supporting locally owned small businesses; building walkability and bike-ability into street design; maintaining well-designed sidewalks, street trees, public art, high-quality parks and open spaces; encouraging mixed-use compact development and human-scaled building designs that activate street life and public participation; and controlling development decisions.

The success of this so-called Jane agenda would undoubtedly herald its own negative, unintended consequences: the sacrifice of our greatest assets of affordability and diversity as well as the displacement of poor people. San Francisco and the East Bay should serve as a foreshadowing of what might become of us on a small scale. Although I’m not going to stop pushing for Worcester’s adoption of a Complete Streets policy that provides for equitable use for walkers, cyclists and car drivers, and I dream of the day when I can safely bike from my home to Union Station, I am well aware that bike lanes are also known as “white lanes of gentrification.”

At some point five or 10 years down the road (and the change can happen very quickly), my guess is that Worcester will meet the tipping point. People will become priced out as beer gardens and artisanal bread bakeries take over the barber shops and bodegas. Current homeowners might applaud this shift, benefitting from an increase in housing prices. City leaders will get excited about the economic growth. Worcester will have made it. But I ask, at what cost?

My friend Joel co-owns a two-family in Somerville, a city we used to refer to as Slum-erville or Scum-erville, adjacent to affluent Cambridge. He feels lucky that he bought the house 20 years ago, when rents were so cheap and even mortgages could be had with little money down. Now, the situation is reversed. Even in Somerville, firefighters and police officers, teachers and city workers struggle to afford a place to live in the city where they serve. Joel has one major regret: that Somerville did not anticipate its affordable housing crisis and therefore failed to put appropriate mechanisms in place to prevent it.

Worcester should not make the same mistake.

Some may toss this article aside, questioning the very idea that we are anticipating an exciting and dangerous revival, instead pointing to the dirty streets and the drug users around downtown. What Worcester renaissance? they ask. I’m positing that yes, not only is the renaissance on the horizon, but we need to plan for the negative impacts of growth as well — that many of us will be closed out of its benefits and glory. Look at some troubling signs: All of the 875 luxury apartments being built in The Grid District apartments and the new CitySquare development near the downtown Common are market-rate rents, starting at $1,200 a month for just a studio. We don’t have an inclusionary zoning policy in Worcester, so no units are set aside as “affordable.”

The Worcester Redevelopment Authority (WRA) has identified the Midtown Mall on Front Street as one of dozens of properties slated for urban revitalization. The disinvested property in need of major physical repair also serves as an incubator for small businesses primarily owned by immigrants and people of color. A July 6, 2016, Telegram & Gazette article cites the tenants’ fears of being displaced from downtown if the WRA forges ahead with the redevelopment plan for the building.

Displacement of businesses and residents in the transit-oriented downtown development is more than a potential threat.

A sign hangs in the window of the Head Quarters Barbershop on Portland Street, thanking the shop’s loyal customers and informing them that “due to the unfair leasing process, August 31st will be our last day.” Owner Jaheira Gomez opened the barbershop in this downtown location four years ago when most of the commercial properties nearby were vacant. Since then, she has built a healthy customer base of MCPHS pharmacy students, police officers and loyal clients who followed her from her former Pleasant Street location. MG2 Group, the current property owners of the Portland Street building that is a key parcel of the new Grid District, are raising the rent $500 a month on the new lease. Gomez points to the apartment complex owned by MG2 Group across the street, Bancroft on the Grid. Several friends living there have also been forced to move as their rents have risen in the past year from $800 a month to more than $1,200 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

Courtesy of Jane Jacobs in the Woo/Joyce Mandell

For the past four years, Jahaira Gomez invested in growing her Head Quarters barbershop on Portland Street. She will be forced to move in August and believes she may have to relocate to another city that is supportive of her enterprise. A customer in the store warns, “The big fish are coming here and pushing out the little fish.”

Gomez has felt the unwelcome chill from the property managers who, she says, have complained to her about her black and Hispanic clientele. “We are not on their agenda,” said one of the barbers employed by Gomez as he was cutting hair. Gomez will move temporarily to Shrewsbury Street, the location where the “wig lady” now has a home. Gomez philosophizes, “If we want to make change here, we need to come together and make sure the change works for everyone.”

In an upscaling neighborhood, who belongs and who is barred? Who is simply priced out?

Worcester can look to other cities that are already tackling the crisis of affordability and displacement for solutions such as inclusionary zoning, rent control, community land trusts, vacant or empty homes taxes and land value taxes. Richard Florida, who is sometimes blamed for the current urban crisis because of his economic development strategy of enticing the creative class to settle in struggling cities, is now advocating the building of more affordable rental housing and the passing of living wage legislation.

In July, Seattle passed landmark legislation to tax the wealthy (singles with incomes over $250,000) in order to fund affordable housing, improved transit and education. For Worcester’s particular situation, some of these solutions may make more sense than others, and we certainly have the people to come up with our own creative ideas. Worcester is blessed with a robust community of social justice activists, housing advocates and community development organizations. Now is the time to come together to research potential policy options and make citywide policy recommendations.

We can enjoy the upcoming Worcester renaissance as it unfolds, but let’s just make sure it is healthy, sustainable and inclusive for all of us.

Joyce Mandell has worn many hats – mom, community organizer, sociologist, community development specialist, urban studies professor. She has lived in Worcester more than 20 years and first moved to the East Side when she served as the economic development director of Oak Hill Community Development Corporation. She believes in the potential of Worcester, the power of praxis and the truth to be found both in stories and stillness. [From Jane Jacobs in the Woo.]

Joyce, congratulations! You are truly a wise truthsayer and a valued fortune teller; you sure know how to tell a story. Thank you so much for the wake-up call and the heads up on some of the pitfalls as the city of Worcester continues their Renaissance journey.

I as a resident with a family friend have found the housing crisis in Worcester already starting to take hold. This friend is in need of an apartment and is finding it impossible to find one in his income bracket, the ones that he is finding that he can afford have told him he must make three times the cost of the rent a month…. this poses a problem, how is it that people can tell you how much you have to earn in income each month as long as you pay your rent, why should they care if you choose to live with just the basic necessities in life in order to live in a decent safe environment… This cities residents need help NOW not sit back to watch and wait till it gets even worse for our long time residents… WE are already priced out of the housing market, and no one but you so far as I can tell has brought it to light. WE need change now not later….

To me, the first question is not whether the new market rate units in Worcester’s city centre, grid and canal districts will displace middle and lower income residents. The first question – a question that the Bay area cities no longer need to ask – is whether market-rate residents will come at all to Worcester’s new downtown market-rate units. If they come, will they stay? How soon will these hundreds of new or refurbished market rate units be fully or nearly-fully occupied? Five years? Ten years? Foresight is wonderful, and the Worcester attendees of the Oakland conference on finding new homes for the displaced are to be congratulated for making the effort to stay informed. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the Bay area cities, along with the other cities mentioned, have something Worcester has either never had or had so long ago that no one alive today remembers it – a vibrant, livable downtown that is a destination in itself, at night and on weekends. So, yes, spend time and energy thinking of the housing crisis caused by displacement and gentrification, as well as equitable solutions. For now, however and very likely for the next ten to twenty years, Worcester’s focus must be on attracting the retail businesses, shops, amenities and services including better public transportation and train service that will attract and keep market rate residents in the downtown area. Where and when will that conference be held?

thank you Joyce for telling it as it is and quite possibly as it will be some day.
Besides Hanover Theatre and Mechanics Hall, where in downtown are the amenities, services, art and creative places to enjoy for the “common resident” especially in the winter? Not all can skate or have money. If we were a city in Europe we would be stoned for taking down Notre Dame Church. Faniele Hall in Worcester would have been nice. Often, all it would take is a developer with vision, commitment, money and a good tax deal. A glut of apartments by for profit developers will not revitalize downtown in itself. It could most likely further divide and disconnect many of the the “real citizens” of Worcester, by income, race, culture and geographically adding to the already unstable, violent discontent in our country. The market rate residents and students will probably come and go and so will I to a better place from the City I love and have lived in all my life.
I’ll buy that Kleenex before I go however.

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